OpenDNS Issue (Gmail.com)

So if anyone has been having issues emailing to gmail users lately I finally found out why.
OpenDNS apparently is having kittens doing proper resolves for any of it.

Now if you’re an OpenDNS user you might say my settings were wrong or something.
Well I reviewed all my settings (disabled all security stuff and filtering) and I would get a bunch of NXDOMAIN(3) errors.

host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.53
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.54
Host gmail.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Whereas using he.net’s dns:
host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.117
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.118
gmail.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4009:802::1016
gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

Quite a big difference eh?

So for the time being we will stop using OpenDNS as our primary dns provider until the issue is resolved.

read more

Cloudflare

Well I add recently converted most of the sites on inexistence to now use cloudflare.
It’s a rather interesting service which has replaced my primary DNS service I used to use everydns.

To break it down for everyone this means better speed as they cache site files for quicker loading.
They also prevent known spambots from even connecting to hosted sites.

For any admin out there I heartily recommend their service as it’s really cost effective to boot.
(We are currently using their free account and it provides so much stuff!)

If you’re using self hosting with WordPress they even provide a plugin for analytics tracking stuff
along with a database optimization feature.
(Though I do automatic database optimization every four hours or so on Inexistence)

Anyways I hope everyone enjoys their just a little bit faster hosting and once again enjoy!

read more